


your eyes have their silence

by pprfaith



Series: Author's Favourites [30]
Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Not Beta Read, Period Typical Attitudes, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Stream of Consciousness, This is pretty much a written aesthetics board, Trauma, Violence, War, anti-war, gen - Freeform, introspective, non-linear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-05-12 07:28:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19224475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: Hawkeye Pierce and love and Korea.





	your eyes have their silence

**Author's Note:**

> Title is an ee cummings quote, because I'm reading cummings right now and I love it. 
> 
> I... look, MASH is my favorite TV series and always will be. I know some episodes pretty much by heart. I love it. It's perfect. And I started writing this after my last binge and then forgot about it. I cleaned it up a little and gave it some kind of ending last night. 
> 
> I hope it manages, in some way, to convey what I meant for it to be. 
> 
> (Probably not. It's a mess.)

+

When he is six, Hawkeye falls in love for the first time. Her hair is golden blonde and falls in soft curls. All her dresses are shades of the sky and she calls him Ben.

“Ben, play this game with me. Ben, let me have your pencil. Ben, stop that.”

She smiles at him and he doesn’t remember that he was ever anything more than that, anyone other than her Ben. 

“I’ll marry her,” he tells his dad over lunch at the practice, chewing his sandwich slowly and with care.

His father chuckles, a deep, gentle thing. He always laughs like that, when he laughs at all, and it always reminds Hawkeye of large, warm hands on his shoulders, holding tightly. “Maybe wait until you find someone who calls you by name, kiddo.”

+

“Have you ever been in love?” BJ asks on his second week (eternity) in Korea. He’s already lost five pounds in weight and gained them back in the dark bags under his eyes. He has stopped wearing his uniform but has not yet appropriated Trapper’s hat for his own. Mostly because Hawkeye hasn’t let him, has hidden it away in his trunk, under a pile of nudist magazines and dirty socks. 

(This deterrent will stop working on BJ soon, when they’ve become too intertwined for shame or disgust, when their edges blur and their lines all cross and no-one in the camp speaks of them as anything other than ‘HawkeyeandBJ’ anymore. But not yet, not yet. Contrary to popular opinion, time does pass in Korea.)

Can’t bear the thought of parting with it, Trapper’s hat, even as he hates the man for leaving it, not even taking that much. List of things Trapper didn’t take: His hat, the still, half his clothes, all his porn, Hawkeye Pierce, Captain.

Hawkeye rolls over on his cot with practice that gives no ease – he still falls off, has to brace with his socked feet, draws them back up, dirty, curls his lip. Frowns. Blinks at BJ, who is not Trapper, doesn’t have his hat, only his bed, his life, his job and his best friend. 

“Did I miss part of this conversation?”

Lowers his eyes, notices the letter dangling from BJ’s hand. Ah. Peg. Mysterious, alluring, distant, maternal, brilliant Peg. Hawkeye suspects a Margaret and carefully doesn’t ask. 

“In love,” BJ reiterates, waves his letter. A picture falls out, fat toddler in sepia tones, edges already softened.

Korea does that to some things. Whittles away their edges, leaving them blunt, dull. Others, it sharpens until you can cut glass with them. Or skin and muscle and tendon. Down to the bone, then the saw, spread the ribs.

The Scandinavians used to do something they called a Blood Eagle, where they spread a man’s ribcage like wings to pull his lungs out through his back while he was still alive. Torture. Execution. Here, they call it medicine. Hawkeye does it with his hands, every day and his nails are never clean. 

He flops back down, throws an arm over his face, grunts. Frank slams into the Swamp with unusually impeccable timing. 

Delay. 

Hawk sits up and fixes himself a drink. 

+

He goes for walks, sometimes, out along the border, where Klinger patrols in his faux-mink stole, where the minefield starts. Weaves between the dump behind the mess tent, the high, dead grass, the cadaver of a stray dog run over by a jeep. 

It boils with flies in August, smells in September, shrivels in October, disappears in November and reappears with the thaw in March, bare bones and a too small skull. Fresh grass climbs through the ribs and a picturesque flower fills one empty eye socket. 

Hawkeye tells his dad about it, in his next letter, rereads and rips up the whole page. The next day, he borrows a shovel and goes to bury the bones. 

Someone has plucked the flower from the socket and kicked in the ribcage. Half the bones are scattered into the minefield, out of reach.

“What are you doing?” Margaret asks, uncharacteristically quiet, when she finds him standing at the edge of it, shovel over one shoulder, staring at a piece of thigh bone.

“Nothing,” he parries. Winks. “Would you like to help me? It involves my tent and a lot of gin.”

She slaps his arm, then grabs it, sinks in her nails, and tows him away. Drops him in the mess tent, across from Father Mulcahy. “Do something with him,” she snaps and leaves. 

She takes the shovel.

+

“Choppers,” Radar says, and the sky is clear and blue and uncaring and nobody else hears a thing.

Henry falls from that sky, over the sea of Japan, years ago, tomorrow, now. He falls and falls and falls and never lands, in his spiffy suit, grinning and still licking Margaret’s lipstick from his teeth.

When Hawkeye was six, he fell in love with a girl who called him Ben. She’s married now, with two lumpy, red-headed children and a mortgage.

Frank giggles like a ferret, Potter rides his horse in tiny circles around burnt out villages, BJ writes letter after letter, all the edges gone soft before he ever sends them and Margaret spends half her pay on cosmetics just so she can look at one beautiful thing every day. 

War isn’t hell, because hell is other people and they’re all alone here, all of them. 

+

“I’m going to marry her, as soon as I get home, Doc,” Private Jenkins cheers, smile half broken. Looks down his cot and the lump under his blanket – singular. “I guess I won’t be carrying her over the threshold, though, ey?” He strokes the girl’s picture, his other hand rubbing above his knees as muscle struggles to move a phantom limb. 

“Sentimental drivel,” Frank mutters as he stalks past. BJ, across the aisle, helpfully sticks out his foot, sends the other man flying. Private Jenkins laughs through fading bruises, asks, “How do I tell her, doc? How do I-?”

+

Becoming a doctor isn’t really a conscious choice, more a forgone conclusion. His father is one, and his father before him and Hawk plays with a stethoscope before the other children his age can spell the word. 

He studies hard, he helps his dad on the weekends, mouths Latin names to himself as he presses skinny fingers into the corresponding muscle groups and bones. It’s no different from Toby, who’ll take over the law firm one day, or Quinn, who’s already working afternoons in the general store with his older brothers and father. 

Hawkeye Pierce will be a doctor and one of his professors will watch him dissect a corpse in his first year and say, “Your hands were made for this, young man. Very elegant.”

“Do you believe in destiny?”

“What do you mean?” Sidney asks, question for a question and sometimes Hawkeye hates the man.

“I mean, do you believe that we’re here for a reason?”

“Well, I heard there was a war on,” Sidney answers, holds out his glass for a refill that comes promptly. 

“Sid!” Hawkeye warns, but the man just shrugs. “What do you believe, Hawkeye?”

Hawk stares at his hands for a long moment, empties his glass. Shrugs. 

“One of my profs told me once that I have elegant hands.” He flutters his fingers to make his point.

Sidney nods along, wisely. “Ah-ha,” he says. Across the tent, BJ snores, snuffles and pulls his hat tighter over his face.

+

“I’m in love twice a week, Beej, haven’t you been paying attention,” he snaps, over a brick and mortar lunch in the mess tent, BJ waving another letter, identical in content, different in date, and asking that same, dumb question again. 

It’s a child’s question. 

BJ rolls his eyes. “That’s not love, Hawk, that’s your libido running rampant. And god knows how you manage that in Korea, of all places.”

“I sleep a lot, live healthy and exercise twice a day,” he parries, instantly.

“A, yes, the hours of grueling standing up and digging through children. Does wonders for the body.”

“Exactly.”

They used to stumble over exchanges like this, little pauses, needing to adjust to the other’s joke. Now they slam them out at speeds that leave Radar gaping and Klinger in stitches and Beej wears the hat now, all the time.

(Hawkeye tells him he looks like an idiot with the earmuffs over it and BJ flutters his lashes and they fall into each other’s arms, swoon, giggle.)

War, Hawkeye muses as he buries his fork in his mashed potatoes, just to see if it’ll stick up, makes parasites of them all.

“Seriously, though, Hawk. That’s not being in love.”

+

It is, though, is the point, because Hawkeye loves them all. Loves the nurses with their too baggy uniforms and dry hair, loves Maragaret with her pursed lips and gentle hands, loves Potter with his mangled swearing and his angry squinting, Radar and his teddy bear, Klinger and his mink stole, loved Frank, even, in his own, hateful way, loves Father Mulcahey and his blithely innocence, and all the boys that live under his knife, all the ones that die. He loves everyone in Korea, loves and adores the farmers in their fields and the children digging in his pockets as they crowd him in the road. BJ most of all.

He loves them because if he didn’t, he’d hate them all. He’d hate them and he’d rage at them and he’s rip at them with his teeth and he can’t do that. He’s a doctor. He fixes things and you can’t fix what you hate. 

You have to love broken things to make them whole again and this whole goddamn country is broken. So Hawkeye loves it, and fixes it, one stitch at a time, and doesn’t let himself even think of hate. 

+

“You know I admire you,” Potter says, one night, too late (early) to be anything but honest. 

Hawkeye looks away, looks back, pastes on a grin. “What a coincidence, so do I!”

Slapstick humor, might as well tack on the matching gesture. He spreads his arms and legs, opens his mouth wide; all that’s missing is the clown nose. 

(Hawkeye has become a parody of a human being. He accepts that.)

The movement jostles his pickled brain and almost sends him sliding down to the floor. Beej, leaning into his chair, grabs him around the waist and anchors him.

This is after Frank and before Charles and at least one surgeon needs to be able to tell his scalpel from his wiener. BJ drew the short straw and he is terribly, awfully (almost) sober. 

His eyes, as he looks at Hawkeye turning himself into a walking punchline, are terrifying. 

“You have eyes like a puppy,” Hawkeye declares and tops off their glasses. 

Potter snickers, crossing one leg over the other. The soles of his boots are caked in dried blood. 

Hawkeye drinks. 

+

It’ll end, eventually. 

The war, he means. It’ll end.

It seems impossible, like the moon being made of cheese, or Atlantis waiting beneath the waves, the kind of impossible you know can’t be, but want to believe in anyway. 

It’ll end. 

Hawkeye has better chances of survival than most in this damn country. He’s not on the frontlines. He’s not a civilian or innocent child. He’s not even one of the poor animals they keep finding in the minefields, blown to bits for wanting that juicy bit of grass over there. 

He’ll probably make it out. 

He’ll go home, hug his dad for approximately twenty-three days. He’ll sleep. He might even run into his first love and her snotty, red-headed children. He’ll smile at them and give them candy that’ll ruin their teeth and have an out of body experience as she still, almost thirty years later, calls him Ben.

He can make up all those details like he makes up bedtime stories for Radar. 

It’s just that he can’t really see himself _living_ them. 

It’s a game all of Korea plays. It’s called ‘What I’ll do after the war’. All of them play, alone, together, in great sweeping narratives. Margaret will terrorize some hospital into making her a General (she will, watch her.)

BJ will go home and be a father and husband. Potter will go retire with his wife and his ranch and his bridge. Radar will save every animal in need in all of Iowa. 

Hawkeye has those details in his head, the story all laid out, but when anyone asks him what he’ll do, all he can seem to say is, “Not be here.”

+

“Hawkeye,” they say, the nurses and the doctors and the soldiers. The patients, those kids, goddamn kids. 

“Hawkeye,” say the natives, the K strangely soft, the sounds turned into something almost cute. “Hawkeye, Hawkeye.”

“Hawkeye, damn it,” BJ says and Margaret adds her own, “Hawkeye, you idiot.”

Klinger, Radar, the Father, Potter, Henry, Trapper, all their ghosts and all their flesh, they all make up the Greek Chorus of it all until it feels like the entirety of Korea knows his name.

“Hawkeye”, they say. “Hawkeye.”

He wakes from a nightmare at three AM, self-medicates with whatever the still is spitting out this week, counts BJ’s breaths to make sure he’s still alive and thinks, wryly, that at least this time, he fell in love with something that knows his name. 

“Hawkeye”, Korea says and he hates it and loves it and knows that, no matter where he goes after this, he will never belong anywhere again as much as he belongs here. 

As long as he lives (and oh, he plans to live forever, at least), Hawkeye Pierce will never really leave this scraggly, blood-soaked, barren country. 

+

“Gotta love this place,” he drawls, stretching languidly, hearing at least three vertebrae crack and crumble to dust. 

BJ, doing the same, groans and nods. “Yeah. Absolutely. I’ll write my travel agent a letter of recommendation for this place as soon as the war’s over.”

Hawkeye nods, sagely, and throws an arm around his best friend in the hopes that the other man will keep him upright. 

They stumble to the Swamp together and somehow manage to land on a single cot, both of them, tangled and mostly on top of each other. It’s uncomfortable as hell, but Hawkeye just closes his eyes and feels BJ breathe against his chest.

He sleeps until the next busload of mutilated child soldiers arrives and dreams of nothing. 

+


End file.
